By way of illustration, the Bible says we need to love one another. You surely would like to love others so you begin to love. You have to realize that it is you who love. Whether you can actually love or not makes no difference; it is you who are loving. Most of us have experienced the failures again and again. It will take you a long time to reach the point where you realize you don’t need to love because the Lord lives in you. When you love by yourself, your loving frustrates His living in you. When your loving is stopped, you have no doing. You are calm, silent, and inactive, but not passive. Inactive doesn’t mean you are passive. The worldly people surely couldn’t understand this. How could someone be inactive and yet not passive? When the worldly people mean inactive, they mean passive. But in our experience, inactive is altogether not passive. We are in a kind of inactive condition—very calm, very silent—yet we are very positive. Yet, we’re not positive in ourselves or by ourselves. We are silent, we are calm, but He gets every inch of our inner room. He has every opportunity, every chance, to do everything. He lives. When we are calmed down He has the opportunity to live.
This does not mean to be calmed down by way of an accident. Sometimes a very active person receives some chastisement from the Lord, and he becomes very calm. That kind of calm doesn’t mean too much. You don’t need to have some big blow from the Lord like losing your job or losing your wife or having your house burn or having sickness to calm you down. I have seen this a lot in the past, but I don’t trust in this. I saw some persons stopped by the Lord in this way. But after a short time, that “horse” became even bigger. This kind of calm doesn’t mean much. The kind of calm I mean is in the measure of your stature. In life you reach a stage where you become a calm person. You are not calm in the outward doings, in fact, you may be very active in outward doings. But your inward situation regarding your contact with the Lord is in a very calm situation. You do not try to love others; you do not even try to pray. You are very calm.
As a further illustration I believe that many brothers when they were married prayed that they would be a good husband, a nice man. They prayed that they would never have a long face toward their wives, but that they would always be smiling and never lose their temper. I prayed this way. But eventually all the brothers have the experience to testify that on the whole earth there is not such a husband. Gradually, we struggled and prayed and fasted and read many books to find the way to be such a husband. Eventually nothing worked. But while you are growing in the Lord you will reach a point where you are calm. Don’t be a bad husband nor a good husband. Don’t be anything. Don’t be somebody and even don’t be nobody. Forget about the being or the not being. If you are really reaching this point, from deep within you will realize that the Lord is living in you. It is not a matter of whether you lose your temper or don’t lose your temper. It is a matter of the Lord living in you. Then you could understand, that it is no more I but Christ who lives in me (Gal. 2:20). I don’t believe that any Christian could experience Galatians 2:20 in full in his early Christian life.
For over fifty years I have given messages on Galatians 2:20, but up to now I still feel I don’t have that much thorough experience of not I but Christ who lives in me. How much Christ lives in us all depends upon how much our being is calmed down. It has to be calmed down not only in loving the world, but even calmed down in prayer. Our being has to be calmed down from loving others. If you keep on this track, some day you will reach a point by the Lord’s growing within you that your being, your person, will be calmed down. Then the Lord will live in you, but not in your sense. He just will live in you. When you reach this point, you will even realize that you don’t need to pray that much. You need more prayer but you don’t need to pray that much. Right now you have little prayer, but you pray too much. Prayer means just to contact the Lord and to keep yourself in a very close and intimate contact with the Lord. Could you spend twenty minutes with the Lord without praying anything? Could you spend that much time just saying, “Lord, I love You. Lord, I need You. Lord, I like to be here with You; I like to look at You. I like to remain here in a precious, dear, and intimate contact with You.” Could you pray in this way? This is what I mean that you have a lot of prayer but you don’t pray much. Many of you don’t have this kind of prayer, yet you pray a lot. You spend a lot of time to pray concerning your need to be more spiritual, concerning your need to live Christ, concerning your need to practice the one spirit with the Lord, concerning your need for impact, concerning your need for the inner life. You pray for your wife, for your children, for so many things. This is what I mean that you have little prayer but you pray too much. You need to have a spacious prayer yet with nearly no praying. As you grow in life you will reach a point that you may be in prayer for twenty minutes with the Lord, but have nearly no prayer. Every experienced person would say the same thing. We are altogether too much in our doing. You pray very much, but that kind of praying is your doing.
We need to continue to speak in this way until we all are reduced. The Lord must reduce all your spiritual doings, your good doings, even your doings for the seeking after the Lord. The Lord will reduce all your doings to make you realize that He is living in you right now. You don’t need to overcome sin or temper, and you don’t need to strive to love others. You just need to say, “Lord, I’m here. I love You. I would like to stay with You.” Spontaneously, He will be your life in a very actual way. It is not that you take Him as your life, but that He is your life. He is just your life. At that time you will realize you are really one with Him, and He is really one with you. He lives in you. You don’t need to live Him; He lives in you. When you reach that point, you will fully realize what I’m telling you now. At that time some probably will not love the Lord so much as you do, yet they are very active and aggressive. You are inactive, but not passive. Actually, you will love the Lord more than they. It may seem at the time that you are not on fire, but actually you do have a thorough mingling of the Lord with you. You would not just feel or sense, but fully realize that the Lord really lives in you. It is altogether not your doing. You are so inactive; you are so calm. You are not cold, yet you are very calm. You don’t hate, you don’t love, even you don’t pray and neither do you not pray. You enter into a stage that the Lord lives in you.